Five Great Tools to Enhance Your Content Marketing Efforts

In the past year, content marketing was the big word in the marketing discipline, and 2013 won’t be much different. Brands and companies that want to keep advertising their businesses online (and who doesn’t today?) will have to embrace this approach as a vital part of their overall marketing strategy. When shopping online or offline and making purchasing decisions, people don’t want advertisements. They want useful information. You can create valuable free content that’s closely related to what you sell but that educates your potential customers on your company and products and instills trust. A quality content marketing strategy gives you the power to communicate and engage with your audience. It gets people to know, like and trust your brand before you even speak to them. Skilled content marketers generate content that encourages people to share on popular social sites.

At the heart of your content marketing strategy should be quality, useful and up-to-date content that your audience will find interesting enough to share with friends and family. You can publish bulks of content each week to get higher search traffic, but if your readers don’t like your articles, they won’t be your fans. If they quickly leave your pages, Google will lower your rankings, so it won’t help your marketing efforts in the long run. Original content with valuable information for your prospective customers will. But you can easily lose track with all the tasks, ideas and plans you need to do. Here are five tools that can help you stay organized and improve your content marketing strategy’s results.

To find inspiration for interesting and useful content, you’ll need to stay on top of the breaking events in your niche, follow trends, and look for ideas that will help you meet your audience’s needs. Topsy is a great source of this kind. It analyzes the most retweeted terms, topics, links and websites. It helps you identify key thoughts, opinions and content ideas. You can anticipate the future outcomes of your content marketing efforts and design and optimize your content accordingly. This tool gives you all the information in one place and enables you to compare your data to others. It’s up to you to use these ideas and develop great content that will enhance your business efforts and build customer trust.

Evernote is free software that helps you collect and organize notes, ideas, things you see or hear, webpages, and images you think will look great in your next post. You can save everything interesting and exciting you find online. You can store all the information in one place and then thoroughly research the topic. You can even share notes and include others to collaborate with you on a project. What’s even better is all this information is synced and made available on every computer, phone and mobile device you use, so you can access it anytime and anywhere.

Google does not want duplicates and will penalize those who try to get high rankings with content that’s been stolen from other websites. It’s best to guide your marketing efforts into creating unique content tailored to the needs of your potential customers. To make sure what you publish on your website is original and never used before, you can use the plagiarism checker PlagTracker. This scans and finds any piece of content that has been plagiarized together with a list of all used sources. Proper optimization is crucial for higher search traffic, and plagiarism should never be allowed.

You can be a content marketing or SEO expert, but minor grammar mistakes can harm your credibility. Flawless content is essential for building your reputation and establishing trust between your brand and future customers. GrammarBase helps you proofread and analyze your content for any grammar, punctuation or spelling mistakes. It suggests simple corrections and improvements in a detailed report that points out all the issues.

In the chaos of different tools, organizers, and calendars that appear each day on the Internet, Google Apps may be the ultimate solution for planning and storing your content. This combination of business applications (Gmail, Calendar, Google Drive) that Google designed can help you better organize your content marketing efforts. It helps you connect and manage all your activities from one place.

Emilia Sukhova is part of the team working on development of PlagTracker’s plagiarism detection algorithm. She is also known for writing articles about technologies related to education and content marketing and reviewing and predicting social media trends and activities.